Your Hair Remembers What Your Blood Forgets: Dr. Manish Arora on LinusBio and the Exposome

0:00Morning.

0:00Dr. Tim Showalter: Good morning, Tim. Welcome back. Thank you. I'm feeling pretty fresh. I recommend for anyone who can a week in Mallorca. It's just the best. Tell me more. Lots of really, really beautiful area, great food, great people, beautiful beaches. I will say if I had some notes, it was really super hot and it's a little stressful driving and parking in particular because it's super crowded, but it is just a magical place. and I could see why it's so crowded. The hum of Nadal, right? Yeah. We're on the other side of the island, unfortunately. So I didn't get to, you know, next time I want to go, you know, do some paddle training at the Rafa Academy.

0:43Paddle? Paddle?

0:44Dr. Tim Showalter: Paddle? I don't, like, nobody knows. I think in my area, to distinguish it from paddle tennis, I'll call it paddle. I trust you. You're the expert here. Well, I'm excited to get back in it. Should we hop in? Let's do it. We got a good one today.

1:02Welcome back to Health Tech Remedy. This is the show where physician leaders in health technology break down the stories behind today's most innovative health companies and speak with the leaders shaping the future of care. I'm Trevor Royce. I'm a radiation oncologist and excited to speak with you all today. Tim? Tim Showalter, also a radiation oncologist

1:17Dr. Tim Showalter: and currently focused on scaling healthcare AI to improve patient outcomes. Tim, one of the most sort of fun and satisfying things about doing this podcast with you is like putting brain space and thinking about things that otherwise you wouldn't necessarily really come across or think about. And this company is just fascinating. I think it falls squarely in that bucket. And I'm talking about Linus Bio. This is a company trying to measure something that healthcare has struggled historically to capture, which is the impact of our environment on our own biology over time and what the implications for some of those exposures might be.

1:48So this is a company that grew out of research led by Dr. Manish Aurora at the ICANN School of Medicine, Mount Sinai. And it uses technology to analyze the molecular and elemental patterns combined within strands of hair, the broader goal being to develop biomarkers for complex diseases and provide a longitudinal view of these environmental exposures.

2:08Dr. Tim Showalter: Yeah, I love the story for Linus Bio. It's really going to be exciting to talk to Manish. I just love that it's an academic, someone who's really involved in research, knows the science well. Clearly, I'm excited to like unpack some of the science with him because there's a lot about this is pretty new, likely to both of us, but it's great to see him stay at the forefront of science and also help bring this technology to patients and consumers. So I think the most recent news for Linus Bio is that they launched Traced, which is a direct consumer wellness test that analyzes a few strands of hair and reports approximately 30 days worth of exposure patterns across 15 elements.

2:52Dr. Tim Showalter: And these include potentially toxic elements, lead, arsenic, cadmium, kind of the usual suspects. And I understand that their pipeline will also add additional elements and other findings as part of the analysis. And I think the basic idea of this 30-day window is that a lot of the other specimens think like blood and urine. It's just like a snapshot in time. And I think the idea here for hair is that you can get a longer storyline about exposures, more like a video clip instead of a photograph. Yeah, I totally agree. A couple of really interesting things about this approach. One is it's always really exciting to think about a whole new data modality in precision medicine that has kind of been either unrecognized or underutilized.

3:39I mean, to your point, we always think about blood or urine markers. and in the case of hair, maybe, you know, DNA sequencing, like that's kind of, you know, a common DNA source. But this goes, you know, well beyond that in terms of capturing molecules based on what you've been exposed to physically. And as you said, finding that and mapping that over time, like if you're, you know, live in an area with bad air quality and there's a lot of smoke because there are forest fires nearby, like presumably that type of information will be captured on this in a long time. And then you wonder like, how is that associated with different diseases and outcomes in your overall health?

4:17So it's, it's much more than sort of a consumer wellness company.

4:19Dr. Tim Showalter: Yeah. And I think of like all the focus we give to thinking about buying organic foods and washing fruit and drinking from BPA free plastic. And it's, it's really true that we, we expend a lot of brain space in this. And I think there is an interest in, I expect there's a market to monitor that over time. So people can take interventions, maybe change their diet, change their activities and monitor how their readout from this test responds. Yeah. Yeah. And I think another key piece of this precision medicine tool is, they're calling it, and I think that's an appropriate way to frame it, is a direct consumer angle where, you know, those that are interested or worried about things or exposures that they might have had can directly order this test as opposed to, you know, a payer-based laboratory pathway.

5:11Dr. Tim Showalter: But I think before we dive into more discussion about the company, we should also state that this is not their first product. They're more than a consumer wellness company focused in this space. They do have an additional product called ClearStrand ASD. And this is a prescription laboratory test that's focused on assessing for autism in children. And I know that they have a pipeline of looking at additional biomarkers. It's a pretty interesting company to have, you know, a real, it's driven by a real focus on environmental health and diagnostics. And there's clearly a focus at meeting and providing, meeting patients where they are, consumers where they are and providing the right insights.

5:50Yeah. I think it too is useful in terms of framing this discussion or setting the table is like thinking about kind of classic examples of environmental exposure. I feel like it's been increasingly evident in the lay news. Some specific examples that come to mind, I think we mentioned wildfires. Every summer we have this story. Certainly in LA, there was a ton of wildfire exposure or smoke coming from our northern neighbors and so forth in Canada. Asbestos obviously is like a classic environmental exposure that is well linked with things like cancers, esothelioma, lead and water contamination.

6:23You know, here locally in Durham, the playground was shut down recently because of high lead levels in the soil. Obviously, the Flint water crisis comes to mind. So it's just like increasingly, you know, there are these exposures that are out there from prior areas of industrialization. And like, how does that impact our health? And such awareness over things like autism. There's just a lot of questions that we're increasingly asking about exposures and pathology. Yeah.

6:48Dr. Tim Showalter: And I would add to that one other thing, which is, you know, people are talking about peptide maxing and all these supplements. And obviously when you get into that space, a lot of these wellness products that are not prescription have some concern about quality and, you know, the manufacturing process and which company you're getting from and how much is their third-party testing to validate it. So I think it's also possible that you could have some wellness-focused people who really are using this to monitor ingested supplements and making sure that there are not contaminants in those as well.

7:23Dr. Tim Showalter: I think that an interesting point about Linus Bio and why it's interesting to think about now is that there is such a growing trend in the consumer wellness focus. They've rolled out the trace test just this summer, I think in July, as a$299 direct-to-consumer wellness test. And it's available throughout the United States. And currently, it's focusing on 15 elements. I think that's a price point that it's on the higher end, but I think for many wellness-focused people, they may view some enough utility from that that it's interesting for looking at longitudinal assessments. Yeah. And maybe it's worth spending a little bit of time about why hair, like what's unique about it and why would that be a sort of novel focus for personalized medicine?

8:10and you know we've highlighted a couple of these already but number one man and we'll you know we'll hear this more in the interview later but like the actual amount of hair sample that you need to submit is pretty you know minimal i think if i remember correctly it was around one and a half inches and you know that could be any hair that's being exposed it provides this longitudinal thing you know hair is obviously growing over time it's easy to access everybody has hair and it has this sort of uniquely external exposure where you're if you're in an environment some of those exposures

8:39Dr. Tim Showalter: can be detected on your hair sample. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure there's some interesting nuanced questions about, you know, what about, we're both middle-aged men, what about our friends who are balding? I think they probably have enough hair to provide a sample. And I know that there's some guidance about what to do about dye or color treated hair as well. But it sounds like, you know, from reading some details about the test, it sounds like a lot of these technical challenges just have a solution in terms of how that specimen's handled. It's pretty interesting to me. It's like the most analogous thing I can think of that I've been aware of in the past is like the rings of a tree.

9:19Dr. Tim Showalter: You know, it's sort of like seeing the story over time. It's really like this idea of being able to take a longitudinal look. Yeah, absolutely. So I think like that's the core premise. I think the leap then is like, how do you know that what you're finding on this hair is actually related to something that's clinically relevant and like bridging that gap. You could have a lot of interesting information, but how do you know that it's actually, number one, actionable information, you know, that will actually help your health in some way. And two, that that association is real at whatever signal you're detecting on that strand of hair will ultimately be a contributor to, at least in part, to your pathology down the road.

9:56Dr. Tim Showalter: Yeah. I mean, I think that some of the challenges you have to untangle, see what I did there, on Tangle, external exposure versus something that was ingested or absorbed within the body. And then also, certainly there are biological or health conditions that may come from the body or host that could influence this. So I think that's the scientific challenge that Linus Bio has to make sure to address in this process overall. Yeah. And, you know, as the health services researcher in the back of my mind, you know, it sort of unlocks a whole category of questions that are worth answering. like looking and seeing what are these factors are associated with whatever outcome or disease you have.

10:35Dr. Tim Showalter: Yeah. And I think to that point for, from a consumer perspective, and I think this is where the thinking about it as a wellness test is useful, but you're going to get some, some signal that for, for healthy patients, the, the, the worried well, I think as, as, as they're called a lot, which are maybe some of these findings are preliminary or are not a sign of a looming clinical condition. And so I think understanding what are the logical next actions that will improve health, it's gonna be something that may vary from person to person and can be complex. Totally. So super fascinating area. I think there's a lot to discuss here.

11:16Dr. Tim Showalter: Any final thoughts before we transition to the interview? I wanna hear a lot about the science. I wanna try to understand what happens when the hair gets into the lab? How do they deal with it overall? I think that's, I really want to hear Manisha explain that in some detail, at least that I can start to wrap my head around and I'm sure there'll still be areas that are above my mental capacity. Yeah, I'm actually really glad you brought that up because I think we have just barely scratched the surface on the actual technical challenges that they've solved. I think there's some robotics involved.

11:48I think there's some lasers involved and like cutting open the strand of hair in a way that you can start to analyze some of these exposures. So yeah, we'll definitely have to hear more on that front. It's a great call.

11:57Dr. Tim Showalter: All right. Well, looking forward to our interview. So stay tuned.

12:04Dr. Tim Showalter: Well, welcome back to Health Tech Remedy. We have our guest today, Dr. Manish Arora, founder and CEO of Linus Bio. Manish, welcome to the podcast. Tim, pleasure to join you. And thank you for having me on your show. Excited to dig in. I want to really start. I know you came from an academic background and have really focused on studying how environmental exposures affect human health. What did you see in the traditional approaches to testing that led you to build BlitusBio? So there was this disconnect in the way we approach medical practice. We all know of this age-old argument, you know, nature versus nurture.

12:40And in modern clinical practice, almost everyone accepts it's actually both nature and nurture. Then we had this massive breakthrough in sequencing the human genome, and all of medicine sort of became this genomic-centric medicine. I saw this missing piece, what field that we call environmental medicine. And if you go back to your clinical days as a doctor, my guess is my clinical days, we got very little information. So here's the disconnect. We know the environment is important, yet when we are treating our patients, we barely ask them about their smoking habit or something like that. And that's what I wanted to fix, bring about clinical tools that we can use to help people stay healthy, but from the realm of environmental medicine.

13:23This, like this concept that you're describing are just, like, it resonates with me so tremendously because it makes so much sense that, you know, the genes are just where we start, but there's so much that happens downstream from that. And to exactly your point, the environmental factors and everything, I think, you know, sometimes Tim and I, we do this job and we, we interview companies and like, this is one where I was just like, my mind was blown about what you guys are working on. This you tell us a little bit about the definition of that, what that means, and put it sort of in the context of genomics, which everyone thinks about?

13:54Absolutely. So, you know, when we first started studying genes, we started with one or two genes. It was, you know, genetics. And then it became genomics when we started studying the totality of our genome. But it's a similar idea. When we first started studying the environment, for example, 20 plus years ago during my PhD, I was studying lead exposure, just one chemical. Again, there's this disconnect with everyday life. We get exposed to thousands of chemicals. So why am I studying one? I would become an expert in lead, somebody else would become an expert in something else. And then, you know, no one was studying the totality of these explorers.

14:32So gradually, the profession moved towards looking at what is your overall exposure, the totality, but over the lifespan. So just like us studying the totality of genes as genomics, we decided to study the totality of our environment. But our genes are static. Since conception, they're the same with a few epigenetic changes. Our environment is changing all the time. And that's what the exposome covers, the life course totality of environmental exposure that will impact your health.

15:05Dr. Tim Showalter: That's an interesting concept. And it does seem, as an oncologist, I get asked all the time, did a certain exposure contribute to why I got cancer? Or there are these really tough questions to unpack. And I know that bringing it to the patient or consumer level, people want to, they have questions, they want to know more. And as I understand it, you recently launched a new product that is direct to consumer called Traced. And I'm curious, what is that design to answer for a patient or a consumer that a standard test can't answer? And how are people finding it useful? Thank you. The new test is called Traced.

15:43It's on our website called trace.life. This is the first test that will, from a single sample collection, provide you an entire month worth of exposure history. Let me contrast that with what we experience. Let's say you do a blood test or you collect urine at home and then go through the cumbersome process of freezing it and shipping it on ice. you are still getting just a snapshot. What was your exposure at that time? But our environment changes every day. The exposures you experience on your way to work are completely different to the exposures you have while you're sleeping at home at night.

16:18So from a single strand of hair collected at home, just clipped with scissors, no pain, no pulling, we give you 30 days, a daily profile of exposure. Right now we are starting off with 15 elements. These are toxic metals, essential nutrients, but we will grow this to over 100 in the next few months. And that's what TRACED is. And when you say 100, you mean measuring 100 different substances within that strand of hair effectively? Exactly. And to be frank, we are already at close to 200, but we're going to release it in small batches so that we can communicate with our clients in a manner that is understandable, bite-sized pieces.

16:58But to answer your question, yes, all measured in hair, all collected at home. We don't need some massive amount of several hundred hair. We just ask for about five strands. And you can bring your children along for the first time on this wellness journey because, look, I'm the father of triplet daughters. The day I had to take them for a blood test, my whole day is gone. But here I can even collect hair while they're, you know, if I have a young child while they're sleeping. All we need is just a centimeter of hair, a few strands. And we map the entire monthly exposure. And, you know, the interesting thing is because we humans lead such rich lives, our exposures on the weekends are different to our exposures on the weekday.

17:39So for now, we can give you guidance that is based on your routine, not just some average that we assumed from one measurement done at an annual wellness test.

17:49Dr. Tim Showalter: I'm curious, what are you hearing from how people are using this? I mean, have you heard from clients who are modifying their behaviors or, you know, their health practices based on this. Absolutely. And I'll share a few examples, but, you know, delving into personal detail for one young, young client, their, their, their mom was having a chat with me once they saw the results. They had an exposure every five to six days to arsenic, which is a really bad chemical to have in your system. And most Americans actually have very low exposure. So where is this coming from? And then we had a chat back and forth and this young man goes, plays basketball at a community center that's undergoing renovation.

18:28So they're exposed to dust and the contaminated water supply and immediately there's action to be done, right? No genomic test will give you something that you can do yourself the moment after you get it. Yes, you know a lot about your genes, but you're not going to be able to change them yourself. What I'm so proud of is that immediately after doing this test, you can take such simple steps, steps that cost you almost nothing. I'll share one other example. There's a group of people affected by the fires in California. This was the Palisades fire that about a year ago, similar to the Canadian fires that we are still experiencing the effects of in some parts of the US.

19:07They came to us and said, well, we don't know what our exposures were before the fires because no one's collecting blood routinely. Can you measure our hair and tell us what our levels of toxic exposures were before the fire, during the fire, and after the fires. And we've just finished that project and you will see as soon as the fire hits, so many toxic exposures go up. But because blood forgets, if you measure them today, you just don't see that signal. So the application of the trace test is very wide. It can be applied in clinical medicine. It can be applied in your wellness journey. It can be applied as a disaster response as is being done in the California fires.

19:47So I think what I'm hearing is somewhat unique about this is that it sounds like these tests are a moment in time and you can take these snapshots in time over, you know, a timeline where you can measure exposures over some duration, meaning it's not a one-time event, but actually you could see how whatever intervention you make to reduce your exposure has improved the amount of exposures in future testing. Is that right? Exactly. And let me describe it in a slightly different way. So if you think of your blood test as a snapshot, what we are creating is a movie, a molecular movie. And maybe now is a good time for me to just describe the technology so your audience gets a visual of how we actually do it.

20:26And the aha moment for me was during, as I was a PhD student more than 20 years ago, I saw a tree that had been cut down. And I looked at the tree and I saw what everyone see, growth rings. You see these beautiful annual rings and you said, oh, year one, year two, year three. And one of those rings was very garbled and very thin. I thought, well, something must have happened. You know, there might have been a drought or the tree got sick somehow. And that was the moment I said, well, what if there are growth rings in a tissue in the human body? And we could track back in time. We could build like a biologic hard drive that would allow us this continuous readout like a wearable but built into you.

21:07Instead of your smartwatch, this is something that grows out of you. And hair have growth rings that you can visualize through computational methods every hour. So if you give me a centimeter of your hair, I'm taking somewhere between 800 to 1 ,000 measurements. It's like giving me a blood test every hour, over a month. Imagine if there was a painless technology to collect blood. You still wouldn't be able to do it because that would be not a great month for you, me constantly waking you up and getting your blood. Here, your body is just doing it for you. Now, one thing is to understand that they are growth rings.

21:41Then there were immense challenges in how to actually analyze those growth rings because they're microscopic. You just cannot see them with your eyes. And that was the next part of the journey in the science of building Linus Bio. Amazing. I mean, this is a little bit tongue in cheek, but a nice thing about hair too is you don't have to charge it every night. And so you have your Apple Watch that's fully charged the next day. It's always with you and no matter what, it's going to record that information. It's exactly right. And it's not like that one hot night when you got sweaty and the smart ring you're wearing is telling you you had a terrible night of sleep because the sweat got between the ring and your skin.

22:21So this is a variable that is naturally built into your thing. And well, if you want to go tongue-in-cheek and if your audience can see me, well, I don't have much hair left on my head. But I can still grow one centimeter at the back of my head if I really put my mind to it. And that's why we decided we don't want to do some test where it's asking you for 300 or 500 strands. I just want one or two. But again, the scientific journey was not an easy one. We had to build robots and lasers and the such, but a very satisfying one. I just would love to hear a little bit more about a particular use case I think that's been highlighted.

22:54And it brings to mind, you know, Tim and I were chatting recently. I just got back from Sequoia National Park, where they have these ancient 2 ,500-year-old trees. And I had the exact same thought where you see the tree rings, and you can tell when the big forest fires were by looking at the differences in the rings. And I think this is actually pretty relevant to some of the use cases that you guys have been thinking about, and you mentioned the firefighters in Southern California. Can you tell us a little bit about how, you know, your technology can contribute to the health and well-being of those people?

23:20Absolutely. And the idea is that to understand how something impacts your health, you don't just have to measure the exposure while the event is happening. You need to understand your baseline. And each of us has a different baseline. So ideally, we would be collecting information on ourselves all the time, especially when we are feeling really healthy and really good about our health. So what hair does, and I'll give you the example of the Palisade fire is, we went back in time before January 2025 because some people had long hair. So we tracked back in time and we have ways to calculate the growth rates in hair.

23:55And we said, okay, this was before the fire. And within a window of plus minus two weeks of error, this is when the fire started. What do the elemental levels look like in your hair? And they just shot up soon after the fire started, spectacularly for chemicals like nickel, for lead, for even zinc and copper, because our suburban structures are full of metal, whether it's our plumbing or the varnish we use, our furniture or the paint in our house or just the food. And then as the levels shot up, we started monitoring them and mapping them to the dates of the fire. And we see that the fire has stopped, The levels in your body remain high for many months and then they trend towards baseline.

24:40So if you examine someone now, you'll say, well, you aren't exposed to this because blood has forgotten. But for all these individuals, we can see which elements went up during the fire. And through all the decades of studies in toxicology and environmental health, we also know the health effects of some of these toxic chemicals. So we can really provide clinical guidance to them through our medical colleagues and say, well, you are at a higher risk of this. And also we can help them take remediation steps. For many of them, their homes are still contaminated. So they need our help in saying, well, this was your exposures during the fire and you need to focus on these strategies specific to these chemicals because one cleaning strategy doesn't work for every chemical.

25:22Dr. Tim Showalter: This is fascinating to get that degree of insight. I'm interested in the science and I understand from your description that it sounds quite complex for how these assays are actually run. But I wonder if you could just give us a little bit of a glimpse into that. I'd love to. And look, I'm honored to share the journey because it was difficult, but one of the most amazing experiences of my life. When we first realized that hair had these growth rings, the first challenge was, which sounds a very simple one, but one that we struggled to do with our hands was to get some people have really curly hair.

25:59When I had hair, it was quite curly. And how do you make it perfectly straight? Because when you do an analysis with lasers and such, they move in a straight line. No matter how hard we tried with our hands, we just couldn't do it. So we decided to build robots. Now, as a clinician with a PhD in environmental sciences, I have no training. So as I started designing these robots, I got to work with the world's best robotic engineers. We found some in Japan who have built us robots that will take even the finest, the thinnest of hair and make it perfectly straight and then stamp it on a slide. Now, if you have worked in pathology, you're very familiar with microscope slides, but getting hair to stay on these slides is not an easy task.

26:40The next task was even harder. We want to slice hair lengthwise, not the way you cut it with scissors. That would be cross-sectionally. That anyone can do. But how do you take a length of hair that was super curly, make it straight, and then open it up like a book lengthwise? Again, it's not something human hands can do. So we build those robots. And when the robot opens up the hair, inside in the core is all what I call the good stuff. By that I mean information that has been captured from blood and stored in this incremental archive. Imagine a train going through a tunnel and as it goes through, it's filled with products, information, but each car remembers its own information.

27:21You're not losing that. You're not mixing it up. And that's how hair grow. So we take a laser now, we go into each train car or each growth ring of the hair, release these molecules, and at each spot, at each growth ring, which represents one hour, we can measure more than 10 ,000 molecular signatures. So I'm going To give you a number, which I hope sort of shocks your audience, from a centimeter of hair, I'm getting 10 million biochemical data points. Compare that to your wearable ring or your smartwatch, which only measure five or six things. We are building a molecular map over time that's never been done in human history.

27:58And I hope you can hear it in my voice. This always makes me emotional because I'm just privileged to be able to look at data like this.

28:05Dr. Tim Showalter: That is remarkable. I'm blown away, for sure. I'm curious, the science and that process alone, just straightening the hair, slicing it longitudinally seems really challenging. I also imagine our hair is exposed to a lot and it's possible that compounds could be, say, on the surface of the hair. How do you distinguish what's integrated biologically through an exposure, through the body, and there based on the growth process versus just what's residual on the surface of the hair? And that was the question, that was the challenge, because so many studies on hair, especially ones that collect a clump of hair and they say, well, here's your number, are actually, you know, the data is due to contamination, like what you said.

28:53You might be a non-smoker, you walk next to someone who's smoking a cigarette, it deposits on the outside of your hair, and no matter how much you try to clean it, you will test positive for some of these chemicals. that's why we had to slice the hair open. The outer keratin layer, for most people the dark the dark layer, that's what captures the contamination but the good thing is it's fairly impervious so that contamination doesn't seep in. So when you open the hair there's a little core inside and we just analyze the core. So again try to imagine the dimensions we are working in. A hair is so thin anyway but we are only looking at a fraction of the thickness of the hair that's the core and mapping it lengthwise.

29:35So all of this, again, cannot be done manually. It has to be done with robots and lasers. But once we exclude the outer layer, we've taken care of the contamination.

29:44Dr. Tim Showalter: That's fascinating. And I guess another question that comes to mind is, obviously, hair, you mentioned curly hair, straight hair, different color hair, different consistency. Do you see variation in the laboratory in handling different types of hair follicles? Surprisingly, the absorption of chemicals doesn't vary much between curly and straight and naturally hair from different color, whether it's black or white, red or blonde. It doesn't vary too much. However, sometimes we are using synthetic coloring agents and that's a concern. So we always ask our clients, just wait a few weeks before your next coloring cycle and get us the hair closest to the scalp because that's the freshest and the least processed hair.

30:33So we've come up with these simple protocols you can use during hair collection at home that allow us to minimize the impact of all these external factors. and I have triplet teenage daughters. When I go over and look at their room, the floor is covered in different, you know, what I call hair dryers, but apparently they're not. There's a dozen different types that all do something special that is beyond me as a bald man. But again, we know we have to be careful that hair hasn't been overheated. So we always take the hair closest to the scalp because that's where you don't have much heat treatment.

31:09You don't have much coloring treatment. Yeah, so just to be clear, I want to make sure I'm tracking this, but all these gray hairs that my kids are giving me, these would be analyzable in your platform. Is that correct? Oh, yes. I mean, absolutely. So we love gray hair, but we get, you know, you've experienced, you know, I used to have gray hair and then I lost it. So Trevor, it can get worse and you will miss the gray hair. That's what triplets do to you, right? Well, remember girls, if you're listening, Tim said that, not me. teenagers. I'm genuinely afraid. But yes, so it doesn't matter. But right now we focus on scalp here.

31:43In the future, we will start looking at hair and other parts of the body because we do get folks who have almost no hair left on the scalp. And we want to start off with a test that's applicable to almost everybody, but we don't want to leave anyone out because this is really a gift from nature, something you can collect at home non-invasively. You know, it doesn't have to be frozen. There is no chemical reagents in the tube, none of the messiness of collecting a urine or stool sample. So we want it to be, you know, the vision is this should be as common as a blood test. I always tell my team, you know, if I ask, I walk into a room and I ask people, how many of you've had a blood test?

32:22Every hand goes up. You know, five to 10 years from now, I want to walk into a room and say, how many of you've had a hair test? I want every hand to go up. Fascinating. I get two quick kind of technical questions. It's really fun to hear about some of these technical issues. I think I heard at minimum you need one centimeter of hair, but you can get more information from longer strands of hair? Absolutely. So you get more information from the longer strands of hair because as hair grows, it's just recording your exposure history. To be a good scientist and fair, the longer the hair is, we have to be more careful for several reasons because it's experienced more.

32:58If you are shampooing your hair, let's say every day, a hair that was grown, part of the hair that grew one year ago has been through 365 cycles of shampooing, whereas the hair that just came out today has only gone through one. So we have learned for or developed computational methods to adjust for some of these factors, but we do have to be careful when the hair gets too long. For most folks, what we say is give us a centimeter of hair, but do it four times a year. That way we have your information during the winter months, during every season. We have lots of weekend days and weekdays. We have holidays in there.

33:33So we get a really good profile. If someone said, hey, you know, give us 120 blood tests over the year, you would say, yeah, that's a pretty good picture of me. And that's really what we are doing with four one centimeter strands of hair every year. We are just building a very good map of who you are. Amazing. And you guys are focused specifically on the exposures in the hair, But there are, I think, nucleic acids, genomics, RNA in hair, but you're not looking at that. Is that correct? So there's actually more information in the hair you could potentially tap into if you guys needed to down the road.

34:06Absolutely. So, you know, if you pluck the hair and you get the follicle, you can get genomic information because it's in that little follicle or bulb of the hair that's below the skin. That makes the process painful, but absolutely, people have done genetics there. I would say there really isn't a need to pluck hair because I could get similar information from just a saliva test done at home. And there's hundreds of companies doing that. However, we're not just measuring environmental exposures. Trevor, that's an excellent point you made, and I'll take a few seconds to describe what all we can measure.

34:35We have a very robust measurement of cholesterol and lipids. So think of, as medical practitioners, let's think about that. Every time a patient came to us, we told them, your cholesterol is high or normal? But what if I ask you, if you were my doctor, what's the rhythm of my cholesterol? suddenly it seemed like that is a very out of place question. But I would argue the rhythm is just as important as the concentration. Just like in music. I'm a Springsteen fan, but I'm a terrible musician. So if you ever ask me to sing on your show, your audience should blame you for that torture. But if I'm singing a Springsteen song terribly, increasing the volume of me playing doesn't help, right?

35:16But that's what we do. If our cholesterol is out of whack, we just say, oh, let's increase it or lower it, right? That's what we do for everything in the human body. Whereas what we should be saying is, hey, let's fix the rhythm of that. Let's fix the dynamics of that. So we measure 10 ,000 molecules. These include things that our body produces like lipids and cholesterols and many other things, essential nutrients, but also toxic exposures like microplastics, things that are forever compounds like PFASs, or things that are contaminating our food supply like pesticides. So we measure a lot. And one of the things that we have learned to do is deliver this information in an easy, understandable manner in bite-sized pieces.

35:58So that's why we're starting with 15 using our trace test.

36:02Dr. Tim Showalter: I'd like to stick on that for a little bit longer in terms of the like providing actionable information to your clients or getting this. And whether people are on a wellness journey and they're trying to optimize behaviors or nutrition or whether they're concerned about a very dangerous exposure, for example, oftentimes there would be some sort of next step clinical action they're looking for or they need to be in contact with the physician for guidance. How do you manage that at Limus Bio? Excellent. We don't want to be a company that just delivers information. I always tell my team, we are a company that delivers insight, actionable insight.

36:45So if you see our reports, which you can see a sample on our website, trace.life, we don't just measure your exposures. We don't just tell you the pattern of your exposures and ask you to think about it. We give you simple, actionable insight at the end of that report. And I'll give you a few examples. Decades of research has been done that shows certain chemicals move together. And we have used all of this information from published peer-reviewed studies, government, you know, quotes. And we will give you insight like, oh, this looks like it's coming from your water supply. So let's look at some, you know, not just your regular water filtration mechanisms.

37:24Let's look at a reverse osmosis system. Just a few hundred dollars. You can even install them yourself these days. They're so simple. Or this mixture comes from traffic dust. Let's look at how you're bringing outside dust into your house. It could be as simple as, hey, stop wearing shoes in the house. Your grandma was right. Just take your shoes off in the mudroom and leave it there. Or how about your window seals? So many of us who are living in older housing in the United States, our windows are leaky. Let's fix that. So we give very actionable insight. In my own journey as a parent of a child who's one of my daughters is neurodiverse, we had a full genetic screen.

38:01I came home and I was so frustrated because there's nothing I can do differently today after the genetic test that I was doing before the test. But that's what we want to change. With this test, you come home and you can start taking action yourself. You don't need to jump into this very complex healthcare system because this is your wellness journey. I think we would be remiss if we didn't hit on a core theme on the show on almost every episode, which is obviously in the era of AI. And we haven't actually talked much about that yet, which surprises me because we've been going for about 30 minutes and it's been a fascinating conversation.

38:35Tell us a little bit about how AI fits in your platform and how it will impact your future as a company and how you work that amazing technology into what you guys are achieving. Excellent point. AI is at the core of what we do. In fact, we describe ourselves as a robotics and AI company. We are a physical AI company. The data we generate and the way we analyze it would just not work with the latest cutting-edge AI. We have four world-class AI engineers in the team. And let me give you a few examples. When you look at a hair that comes out of the tube, one of the first challenges we faced was, hey, which direction is it growing in?

39:13If I mounted it on a slide, is it growing left to right or right to left? Because it would completely confuse and make the reading wrong. So we took thousands of images of hair and manually coded them. And we develop these image recognition tools that look at a hair and it can just tell you by looking at these growth things that you cannot see with the human eye. A hair is growing in this direction and that's only possible with AI. Then we generate 10 million biochemical data points but that's not the difficult part of analyzing the data. The difficult part is this. We have 1000 time points and each time point we have 10 ,000 molecules.

39:53Where was the last time as clinicians you saw any patient who has a thousand time points of data? So there were no off-the-shelf tools to analyze these patterns over time. So we turn to music theory because it's like a symphony. Different instruments are playing but all have to be synchronized. But which one is going out of sync? So again, AI comes in. And lastly, we are developing AI tools that are customer-facing because people don't just want to read, you know, a five-page report. Our vision is you wake up in the morning and you have an app on your phone which says, hey, this is Linus, your report is back, let's talk, let's have a 30-second micro-learning experience first thing in the morning while you're preparing your coffee and say, look, your lead levels go high every x days.

40:39We think this is happening. When you need more information, talk to me. But all of this cannot be built up on existing AI platform because they're sucking information off the wider internet. We have to use very curated information. This test is so novel that we have a unique data set that only we can train the AI. So we are working very quickly to make this whole experience right from the analysis down to the customer interaction using novel AI technology, which honestly is the very core of our company.

41:13Dr. Tim Showalter: Fascinating. Unfortunately, I think we're coming towards the close of our time together. I think Trevor and I could talk about this topic for much longer, but I wanted to ask a two-part question. So one is focused on the present. I know that Linus Bio has some commercially and clinically available tools right now. So it's the first part is please share with the listeners how to access this technology. And the second part is, what should we look for from Linus Bio over the upcoming, say, two, three years as the offerings continue to evolve? Absolutely. So go to our website called trace.life. And, you know, we provide a very simple explanation of this test that measures 15 exposures.

41:57There's a sample report, so you will see what you're going to receive. Any questions, just email us. Our email is there on our website and we guide you through the whole process. So a very simple experience. That's now. In the future, we want to empower you by giving you a much more comprehensive sense of what your environmental health looks like. So right now we're measuring 15 things. We can already measure 150 in the background, so we will continuously keep releasing new panels. However, our exposure history keeps changing. We constantly produce new chemicals through industry and release them.

42:35So we want to help you always have the latest technology available to you. And that way you're always, you know, up to at the cutting edge of what can be measured in your environment. So that's what's coming in the future. A more comprehensive measure because let's compare what I just said to what the reality is today. Most Americans all you're measuring in your house is your temperature through your thermostat and maybe your fire exposure through your fire allowance. But we really don't know what's happening in our homes. And we plan to change that. Well, it's been an amazing conversation. And I think we'll definitely have to have you back because there's a lot more to talk about.

43:14And we didn't get to do our Bruce Springsteen karaoke. So maybe we can do that next time. And if I heard it right, traced.life is where people go to learn more information about this. That's correct. Yes. Very good. Well, thank you for taking the time and we look forward to staying in touch. It's been a pleasure. Thank you both. I really appreciate it.